and introduce them into another organism, something that would not happen in the course

of nature. The process by which this is done, there's potential to cause all sorts of collateral

damage in the genome of organisms and it's very hard to foresee all of the downstream

consequences of making those changes.

For example, flounders have an antifreeze protein that enables them to swim in very

cold water and not freeze solid. So you can take the gene that makes that protein and

put it into strawberries and at first glance that sounds like maybe this is a good thing

it will enable you to grow strawberries at higher latitudes, longer in the year, that

they would resist freezing, there would be more strawberries for everybody - that could

be good. On the other hand, who knows what might happen if human beings start eating

this flounder protein in greater quantity than they ever did. It might cause allergies,

it might do other things, we don't know. And it just seems to me that if the people doing

this are, first of all trying to foresee all this stuff, that would be okay but I doubt

that they are, and if they are doing these things to produce fruits and vegetables of

higher quality with better nutritional profiles, that's one thing but that's not what they

are doing. They are doing it to either make things that are more resistant to shipping

or so forth. And there is a body of scientific evidence showing that animals that are fed

genetically modified crops develop ranges of health problems.

It's an area in which I would be cautious and at least we should not have these things

foisted on us without our knowledge so at least there should be clear labeling on the

products that are genetically modified so we can choose whether we want to buy them

or not.

There actually are already a lot of things out there that we are eating that we can't

do anything about, but this is one of the good things about the federal organic standards

- if something carries that label from the Department of Agriculture, it cannot be genetically

modified.